The older I have gotten, the more I believe that short term gains are better than long term strategies because short-term gains build on each other.
I don’t know the history of crispr, but I doubt it was just a single check, single project completed from start to end. I’m sure it took a lot of iteration and success of many small short-term goals
It’s the nature of the goals not the time it takes to reach them that I am talking about.
A COVID-19 vaccine is extremely valuable today, but it becomes useless even 5 years from now. On the other hand our experience with COVID-19 is likely to spawn a great deal of research into developing vaccines faster which while useless for this epidemic could be extremely valuable for the next several.
Clearly a COVID-19 vaccine could save millions of lives and is worth investing in, but it’s a specific finite number. So called basic research can save more people’s lives than are alive today.
I don’t know the history of crispr, but I doubt it was just a single check, single project completed from start to end. I’m sure it took a lot of iteration and success of many small short-term goals